The Other Side of the Door
by neoxphile
Summary: A set of stand alone drabbles about who might have been on the other side of Audrey's door at the very end of 2x12.
1. Sharp Dressed Man

Title: The Other Side of the Door  
>Author: Neoxphile<p>

Summary: a set of stand alone drabbles about who might have been on the other side of Audrey's door at the very end of 2x12.

Author's notes: each of these chapters is a self-contained "what if," not meant to connect to the others. I haven't decided if there will be any romance yet, but at the moment I'm leaning towards not.

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><p>"Nathan, you're early!" Audrey complained playfully, throwing open her door. Her eyes widened in surprise, because it wasn't Nathan who stood there.<p>

Just before the wire of a stun-gun hit her in the chest, Audrey had time to realize that...

I.

... the olive-skinned man holding the stun-gun was dressed in black from head to toe. He wore a stylish black suit, and his dark hair was mostly covered by a pork-pie hat. His look was grim, as if he wasn't pleased to be in the middle of shooting her.

It was the last thing she thought about for a while.

When she came to, she was sitting in a chair, obviously in the middle of a cheap motel room. She started, surprised to realize that she wasn't tied down like she'd expected herself to be.

"Where am I?" she demanded of the man standing by the window. He was looking out to a covered up swimming pool. A few leaves had collected on the cover, and they were beginning to turn brown already.

"Old Orchard Beach," her capturer replied easily. "It has some historical significance."

"What?" Audrey asked blankly. A faint memory of the name rose up in her mind, but she thought it had only been the location of a story on the Channel 8 nightly news. At least she was pretty sure that she was still in Maine.

"In September of 1976 a man named Herbert Hopkins had an encounter he wasn't supposed to remember, right here in this town."

Audrey shot him an uneasy look. What possible relevance could something that had happened the year after Nathan and Duke's births have to her current predicament? "Did he?"

"He did. A young man came to him and revealed under hypnosis that he'd had a number of encounters with extraterrestrials. That of course, is impossible."

"Of course." Trying not to be obvious about it, Audrey studied the room around her, and had to repress a frustrated sigh. There was nothing in arms' reach that could be used to subdue the man.

"Of course?" he repeated mildly. "You don't believe in aliens, then, Ms. Parker?"

"I haven't given their existence much thought, one way or the other." That was true. She'd been far too busy to contemplate things that weren't causing problems in Haven.

He turned towards her. There was a gleam she didn't like in his flat gray eyes. "But you believe in a great many other things."

"Doesn't everyone?" she asked, pleased that her voice didn't tremble even a little despite the cold feeling his gaze gave her.

"No," the other man said severely. "They don't believe in such dangerous things as you do."

"Oh."

"You'd better stop," he warned. "If you don't, you'll be sorry."

"I don't-"

The man got up and walked over to her. She cringed when he reached into his pocket, terrified that he'd pull out a weapon. Instead he pulled out a shiny disk. It looked like a coin to Audrey, but the writing on it wasn't in a language she'd ever seen before, and she couldn't even begin to make out what the picture was.

He held it in front of her, flipping it between his fingers in a way that didn't seem physically possible. "Do you see this?"

"Yes."

It continued to flip between his fingers, and as she watched it, she became light-headed but she couldn't look away. All of the sudden, it slipped between two fingers and out of existence. "It was here," he said, "and now it isn't. Do you understand?"

Audrey opened her mouth, ready to say "not really" but she hesitated. "Yes."

"This can happen to anything. People, people you care about...they can slip between too. You don't want that, do you Ms. Parker?"

Fear for Nathan welled up in her, and right behind it was worry about Duke. "No, no, I don't."

"You can make them slip away, just like this coin. If you continue to believe those awful, dangerous things, you'll make it happen."

"But I don't want that," she squeaked.

To her horror, he put his hand under her chin and lifted it, staring at her with now dark, dark eyes, eyes that made Duke's look pale in comparison. "No more talk, Ms. Parker. Never tell anyone about the things you've seen. Not any more."

"But I do see them," she found herself protesting.

"Keep them to yourself. Understand?"

"I understand."

He patted her on the head. "Good girl."

With that he turned and walked out the door, leaving a shaken Audrey to watch him go.

As soon as he was gone, she picked up the phone and dialed Nathan's number. There was no answer. Duke's phone didn't pick up either.

Sighing, she thumbed through the phonebook and called a cab company. This time there was an answer on the other end of the line. Getting a ride back to Haven would cost a fortune, but she considered going home well worth the price.

If never speaking about the Troubles kept Nathan and Duke and everyone else safe, that was worth the price too.

The End

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><p><em>an: I'm going to have a busy November, but I'll try to update in a few days. fingers crossed._


	2. Love Conquers All

"Nathan, you're early!" Audrey complained playfully, throwing open her door. Her eyes widened in surprise, because it wasn't Nathan who stood there.

Just before the wire of a stun-gun hit her in the chest, Audrey had time to realize that...

II.

...she was looking at a dead man.

Surprised, she had time to think, _I can see the ghosts now?_ before her head hit the floor and she passed out.

When she came to, it seemed to be hours later, because the window next to the unfamiliar bed she was in showed an indigo sky as the sun set. Startled, she looked down at herself, and was relieved that she was wearing her own clothes this time.

"You're awake," a familiar voice said from the doorway.

Craning her neck, Audrey turned to look at the speaker. "Chief?" she asked, voice cracking from dryness. It had been hours since she'd had anything to drink.

Sighing, the chief brought a glass over to her, and scowled when she gave it a suspicious look. "It's water. Drink it."

Scooting back, Audrey sat up and cupped the cold glass between her hands. She still felt shaky, so the task required both hands to get the water into her mouth and down her throat.

She handed him the glass back before giving him an accusing glare. "You tased me."

He sighed. "I'm sorry. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"It seemed like a good idea?" she asked, voice rising.

"Tell me the truth, Parker," he said, reminding her acutely of his son. "Would you have come with me if I asked nicely, or panicked because you'd been visited by a ghost and it's not even Christmas eve?"

When she said nothing, he snorted.

"That's what I thought. Since my son is too stubborn to listen to me, you and I need to have a little chat-"

Her brow furrowed, and she tried to reason though a fierce headache. She had no idea if it was due to being tased, or if it was stress induced. Either way, it was making it hard to think. "You're not a ghost, are you?" She reached out and flicked her fingers at him, feeling solid flesh.

"Stop that," he complained. "I'm not a ghost."

"How?"

"We'll get to that. But I need to talk to you first," he said firmly.

It was probably the most bizarre conversation she ever had, even including the one she had with the other Audrey when they first met by pulling guns on each other. "Okay, tell me...whatever it is."

The chief nodded, and dragged a chair over next to the bed. Looking very dour, he said, "You can't be in love with Nathan."

"Why not?" she asked automatically. Dimly she was annoyed that Nathan hadn't mentioned his father telling him that, but she supposed that it would have been difficult to smoothly add to one of their conversations over the past day.

"Because it'll ruin everything. You and Nathan, if you fall in love, really fall in love, you'll destroy Haven."

"When you say 'destroy,' you're being figurative, right?" Audrey asked hopefully.

"No!" he thundered, making her jump back and smack her head against the headboard, which did nothing for her headache. "You remember that sinkhole Max fell into? You'll cause the whole of Haven to be swallowed up, killing everyone."

"Jeez, I care about Nathan a lot, but that's not worth the end of the town."

The chief gave her a hard look. "And don't be getting any foolish ideas about the Crocker boy either. That'd be a disaster too."

"Wait, what? If I fall in love with Nathan or Duke I'll destroy Haven?"

"That's about the long and short of it," the chief agreed.

"But!" she sputtered, waving her hands around. "What about 'love conquers all?' That inscription on the silver box has to mean something!"

"Of course it does," he growled. "What do you think conquers means? Crush, destroy, annihilate. Love will be the end of everything."

"Oh my God, that's so unfair!" she cried.

"Who said anything about fair?" he asked cruelly.

Audrey stared at him. So many things in his life hadn't been. So why had she been so sure that hers would be?

"Come on," he said. "We have to go explain this to the other two before you idiots get us all killed. Again."

Sighing, Audrey got to her feet and followed him out of the room.

The End


	3. Water Colored Memories

"Nathan, you're early!" Audrey complained playfully, throwing open her door. Her eyes widened in surprise, because it wasn't Nathan who stood there.

Just before the wire of a stun-gun hit her in the chest, Audrey had time to realize that...

III.

... she had only seen the man once before.

As her head hit the floor, she heard him mutter, maybe to himself, "You've going to fix this." She didn't have time to wonder about it before blackness claimed her.

The next thing she was aware of was that the floor beneath her rolled gently. It was a familiar feeling, and her first wildly hopeful thought was that she was on Duke's boat, maybe being whisked away to another ill-fated birthday party. But when she pried her eyelids open, she realized that Duke was far away, and Nathan was too. Neither of them would have left her sprawled on the floor unconscious like that, not even as a prank. Not to mention that neither was the sort of person to tase their friends or potential lovers.

She was in a boat just as she thought, but this one was completely unfamiliar. When she lurched to her feet and looked out one of the small porthole windows, the view was not. They were coming into a harbor, one she had visited dozens of times before. Glancing at the door to the cabin, she wondered how long she had been out. Long enough to have traveled from Maine to Boston.

It was only then that she began to take in her surroundings. It was a nice boat. It wasn't rusty, it had never done a stint as a fishing boat, but it probably cost the owner quite a lot of money to have expensive wood inlays put in. Whoever owned the boat was probably quite accustomed to luxury. A lawyer maybe, or a senator.

The door creaked open, and a disgruntled face peered in at her.

Or a doctor.

Through her pounding headache, Audrey struggled to fish his name out of her memory. "Brad?" she asked, thinking that it had to be correct.

He stalked into the room and glared at her as he sat down in one of the swivel chairs bolted to the floor. "You're going to fix this," he said, echoing what he had said just after using the taser on her.

It was only then that she realized what he wanted her to fix. A stab of sorrow pierced her, and guilt. Looking up at his agitated face, she knew without asking the other Audrey wasn't better. "I…" was as far she got, since she had no idea how to finish such a sentence.

Brad fixed her with a disgusted look. "You. You stole her memories."

While she could understand the accusation, she knew it wasn't true. Lucy Ripley still had all of her memories, even though Audrey, or maybe someone who just happened to look nearly identical to her (Audrey still wasn't entirely sure what she thought of that), had borrowed hers, and the other Audrey had come to Haven with intact memories herself. No, merely having her memories copied hadn't deprived her of them...

Duke had told her that he'd found the other Audrey wandering in the woods, no longer able to identify him or much of anything else. He'd said she'd been out looking for a building at the time, but when Audrey and Nathan had looked for it later, they had found only a spot where a building had been. Whatever had happened to the woman, the building must be the key.

Even though the loss of Audrey two's memories was not her fault, she still felt awash in guilt. She should have spent more time thinking about how to help the other woman, and not blithely assumed that she had recovered once she had returned home. It had been weeks, maybe months since she had wondered how she was. Things in Haven had kept her busy, but as she looked up at Brad's hurt and angry expression, being busy seemed like a flimsy excuse to have essentially forgotten about the other woman's problem.

"You have no idea what it's been like for her," Brad began to rant, getting up and pacing as he did. "When I realized that she knew who I was, at first I was hopeful that she'd just wake up some morning and be fine. But it hasn't been like that at all."

"I'm-" Audrey broke off, suddenly puzzled. "How do you even know that I have her memories? If hers haven't come back yet, she can't have told you herself."

"She didn't," he said. "Someone seeing us leaving Haven mentioned it to me before I brought her home. They remarked on how close the two of you were, and how you were always reminiscing about things that I figured out had happened to her, not you."

Audrey nodded slowly. While it hadn't been a story in the Haven Herald, the fact that they shared memories wasn't exactly a tightly kept secret either. Any number of locals who had heard the two of them talking about the past could have put two and two together and come up with them having grown up together, if not having fully realized their true link.

Eventually she gave him a long look. "What's the plan here, Brad? You're a doctor, which suggests that you're pretty smart. Smart enough to know that kidnapping is a serious offense, and if you're still willing to risk it...tell me that there's more of a plan here than hoping I'll be able to wriggle my nose at her, Bewitched style, and fix her."

His hands had been balled into fists, but they began to relax. "I don't think you have magical powers."

"Good, because you'd be in for a world of disappointment if you did." She tilted her head. "So, what do you expect me to do?"

"Stay with her for a while."

"How long a while?" Audrey asked, beginning to feel a little less uneasy about the situation. As being kidnapped went, spending time with the other Audrey was one of the least unpleasant ways she could imagine the situation turning out.

Brad's shoulders rose in a helpless shrug. "I don't know. Long enough to tell her everything."

"I'm not sure what you mean."

He began to pace the cabin again. "I've been thinking about it for months, and I finally decided that the only way she's going to get all of her memories back is if she hears them. And you're the only one who can tell them to her."

"You want me to tell Audrey her life story?" Audrey asked, feeling a bit surprised though she wasn't sure why she should. As insane plans went, his wasn't so outlandish.

"Yes!"

"All right."

Brad eyed her suspiciously. "You'll do it? Just like that? Not try to run off as soon as we dock?"

"I'll do it. You need to allow me to let my partner know that I'll be gone for a little while so he doesn't show up here in a lather once he figures out where I am - and he'd figure it out, Brad, really - but yes, I'll tell her everything I can remember about our lives."

Her life, Audrey realized with a heavy feeling just then. She didn't have a past of her own, even though it felt real enough. Despite what the Teagues had said to her about her having been Lucy and Sarah, a small part of her stubbornly insisted that it wasn't true, and there was a past of her own to reclaim. She might not be on the path of doing that for herself, but she _could_ help the other Audrey.

"Thank you," Brad said quietly.

A small knock sounded loud in the room, and Audrey whipped her head towards the door. Nothing had made her aware that they weren't on the boat alone, so it was a shock to realize that the vessel held at least three souls.

The other woman's face was uncertain at first, but something flickered in her eyes. A faint recognition. "We've met," Audrey Two said tentatively.

"I'm Audrey," Audrey said with an encouraging smile.

"I know," the other Audrey replied, sounding a little more sure of herself. "You said we were close friends."

"Yes. Brad here thinks I can help you with your memories."

"Oh." Audrey expected her to protest or demand to know how, but she didn't. "That would be good."

"I think so too." Audrey watched her sit next to her boyfriend and began to think back, searching her mind for the earliest memory that the other woman had given her. "Your mother loved flowers. Lily of the Valley especially. When you were almost three you and your father went to a greenhouse and saw a display of them..."

The End

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><p><em>an: Are you there, Readers? It's me, Neoxphile. Please give me a sign._


	4. You Can't Go Home Again

"Nathan, you're early!" Audrey complained playfully, throwing open her door. Her eyes widened in surprise, because it wasn't Nathan who stood there.

Just before the wire of a stun-gun hit her in the chest, Audrey had time to realize that...

IV.

... she could see herself, shrunk down in size, and peering at her with terrified eyes. A strange hallucination, she thought, her own eyes closing when electricity raced through her.

When she came to later on, it was with the sting of a slap on her cheek. Before she even opened her eyes, Audrey was backing away from whatever hand had just touched her. When her back found a wall, it occurred to her that she was in a bed.

"For a while there I didn't think you were going to wake up," a nearly emotionless voice commented from just feet away. The voice wasn't detached but sounded controlled, as if the speaker was doing everything he could not to scream at her.

Toddlers can believe that if they cannot see you, you cannot see them, but Audrey was a grown woman, so she knew that keeping her eyes tightly shut was not actually any sort of defense from the person speaking to her. "Who…?" she asked, looking up at a man she had never seen before.

He was handsome enough that she would've noticed him around Haven. His thick dark blond hair and piercing green eyes would have registered with at least a flick of interest. The man had to be a stranger, and she wasn't sure how she felt about that. If he wasn't from Haven, she probably wasn't in Haven…She was in a home, somewhere.

As he looked at her, his expression became disgusted. "So what's the game, you going to pretend that you lost your memory after you ran away?"

Ran away from what, she wondered. The way he spoke to her implied that he believed that she wasn't a stranger, even if she had never seen him before. "I don't know you," she said slowly.

As she feared, he looked angry. And because she knew that she was unarmed she became alarmed when he moved towards the bed, but he sat on the foot of it, well away from her. "I don't know how I knew, but I knew this would be your tactic."

"Tactic?" she repeated, uncertain.

Clearly the man thought that she was messing with him, but she couldn't for the life of her figure out why. Was it simply a case of mistaken identity, or was there something worse going on? She only had it on Vince and Dave's say so that she had been other women before. What if they were wrong? What if she was _not_ a woman without a past? She could play the piano, after all, and the other Audrey had never learned to.

"Look. I know that things were not great between us when you left, but pretending that you have no idea who I am? That's insulting. It sounds like something out of a bad mystery novel or one of those movies on Lifetime." There really wasn't anything she could say that, so she just looked up at him, eyes wide with confusion. This just made him sigh. "The vows say for better or worse, and I guess this is just an instance of worse."

An icy finger traced its way down her spine. Vows? There was only one type of vow that contained the phrase for better or worse… Trying not to be obvious about it, she studied the man's face, hoping to find a sign that he was joking, or maybe something that would spark recognition. She found neither. Taking a deep breath she asked, "How long has it been since you saw me last?" It had been her inclination to add the words 'you believe that' to the question, but she decided nothing good would come of it.

The blond man snorted. "You're still going to play it that way, huh? Fine. Sixteen months, two weeks, and three days. And every day of it has been hell."

"Oh." That was within weeks of her arrival in Haven. She idly wondered how long she had lived in that apartment in Boston but with effort forced the thought away, not wanting to give his insistence that he knew her even that much credence.

"Do you have any idea what we've been through? People keep asking me questions, 'Jason, when is she coming back?' And then '_Is _she coming back?' And I haven't known what to tell them. Because you left without saying Goddamn word about why you were leaving, where you were headed, or if you ever plan to return. I still don't know why you left, and until a week ago I didn't even have any idea where you went." He shook his head, as if he couldn't believe how terrible she had been to him. "I'd almost given up hope that I would ever find you, but I finally found a twitter feed that mentioned a news story that had your picture along with it. You've been pretending to be a cop? Jesus."

But Audrey was struck by the word "we." She nervously hoped that he had been referring to her parents, maybe. Or, more accurately, the parents of whoever it was that he had the mistaken impression that she was.

He got up and stood by the bed. "You have no idea how difficult it has been to do everything on my own. If I didn't have an accommodating boss, I don't know what I would've done."

Audrey was tempted to ask him exactly what constituted this "everything" he had to do on his own but before the words could exit her mouth the door to the bedroom creaked open. When she turned her face to look, her stomach fell to her feet.

What she had seen when he had tased her had not been a hallucination.

The little girl looked slightly less horrified, but there was still a wariness to her expression. She hung back, standing in the doorway, as if afraid to come into the room.

He noticed that Audrey's attention was on something else, and turned to look himself. "Dammit, Lily, I told you not to come in here."

Lily's eyes immediately became downcast, but not before Audrey had time to realize that their shade of blue was identical to her own. The child's hair was even blonder than hers, but she knew that blondes usually darkened with age. She had never seen a photo of herself at three years old, if she had ever been three years old, but she was willing to bet that if one existed it would look just like this girl.

Eventually the girl spoke. "Hayden is awake, Daddy. He's cryin'."

Audrey stared at the child, confused and unhappy. From another room she could hear the faint sound of a baby or toddler crying. A hysterical voice in the back of her mind said that the baby in question must be over a year old given that his mother had been missing nearly a year and a half.

The man stalked out of the room without another word, his footsteps receding in the same direction as the baby's voice. It was only after he brushed past the girl that the child moved. She walked towards the bed that Audrey was beginning to feel ridiculous for still crouching on, and came to a stop several feet away, studying Audrey.

"Hi," Audrey said cautiously.

It took all of her willpower to hold it together, and not to go to pieces in as spectacular a fashion as Nathan's father had. As much as she didn't want it to, it was becoming clearer and clearer that whatever force had brought her to Haven and given her Audrey Parker's memories had ripped her out of a different life and had banished her memories of it.

Moving cautiously, the little girl, Lily, climbed up onto the bed with her. Looking at her with wide eyes, the girl asked, "Are you back to stay, Mommy? Or are you goin' 'way again?"

Audrey just stared at the child, at a complete loss for words.

The End


	5. Jaded

"Nathan, you're early!" Audrey complained playfully, throwing open her door. Her eyes widened in surprise, because it wasn't Nathan who stood there.

Just before the wire of a stun-gun hit her in the chest, Audrey had time to realize that...

V.

...the man's expression was one of grim satisfaction. As her eyes rolled back, she cursed him but the words didn't escape her throat.

The first thing Audrey did when she woke up and found her wrists bound in front of her was to scream for her attacker to come face her.

Her location was a vaguely familiar one, a living room she'd been in before, as she knew it would be when she felt the couch under her. Why he'd brought her home, rather than somewhere more secluded, she couldn't imagine. It suggested disordered thinking on his part, but so too did the kidnapping.

"What? What?" he asked, coming into the room a couple of beats after she yelled.

"'What'?" she repeated acidly. "You can't imagine why I yelled?"

"Of course I can imagine reasons why," Chris Brody said easily. "Too many possibilities."

Audrey thrust her wrists towards him. "Untie me."

Haven's resident marine biologist took a step back and shook his head. "I don't think that's a good idea."

"A good idea? Where was your concern about how 'good' an idea was when you decided to commit assault and kidnap someone? 'cause I've got to tell you, Chris, those weren't good ideas."

"We'll have to agree to disagree."

Something about the look in his eyes made Audrey's blood run cold. The usual undercurrent of condescension was absent, and something darker and more desperate had taken its place. She was glad when he turned away to look out the window instead of at her.

Trying not to be obvious enough to draw his attention to whatever it was he was looking at outside, she wriggled a little, just enough to confirm what she already had been nearly certain of: not only was she bound, she was completely unarmed. Thinking back, she could picture her gun sitting next to the mixing bowl in the kitchen. Nathan had probably already found it, and she hoped that he'd had the wherewithal to think of turning the burner off because there wasn't a chance in hell that Chris had...and even if he had noticed it was on, he probably wouldn't have cared if it set the whole place on fire.

She cringed when he turned back towards her and sat in a chair just inches from the couch where he'd put her. "I did try, you know." He gave her a moment to respond, and went on when she didn't. "I knew it was pointless because people thought I was the next best thing to sliced bread in England too, but I tried anyway. For you? I don't know, maybe. For myself for sure. But it just didn't work."

Ignoring his dejected expression, she cautiously asked the expected question. "What didn't work?"

Chris waved his hands and she flinched away, expecting a blow that didn't land. "Accepting the fact that other people were just going to love me without knowing the real me. I went on dates, hoping that maybe you weren't unique and there were other women out there who could like or even hate me for myself, not because my trouble made them. I slept with a few of them, but that was hollow. Eventually I decided to berate one of them, hoping to inspire something other than dumb devotion, but she just smiled adoringly when I called her a whore."

As she listened to him, Audrey felt nothing but disgust. His sleeping with 'a few' women was nothing she wanted to know about, but it was his matter of fact description of what he'd done to the woman he'd been trying to provoke that really made her blood boil. It made her wonder if he might not be a sociopath. She fought hard for control over her emotions, not wanting to give him what he wanted from her.

"So, like I said, I tried. After it didn't work out I might have been able to accept it, at least until I found out that you'd kissed Nathan."

Her eyes involuntarily widened in shock. "How did yo-"

Chris ignored her question. "I could have handled it if you'd taken up with Duke because he's not troubled-" He failed to notice her startled look when he revealed that he clearly hadn't heard about Duke's newly revealed trouble. "-but Nathan? How could you take up with him, Audrey? You left me because I needed you to feel normal, you said that. And then you run into the arms of someone who can feel your touch alone? Jesus, Audrey, you can't have fooled yourself into thinking that he doesn't need you just as much as I do!"

She hadn't really been able to explain the difference to herself yet, so she was hardly in the position of making sense of that for Chris. "So now what?" she demanded to know, cutting to the chase. "Step one of whatever this plan is was to get me here. What's next?"

His eyes were dark when he shook his head slowly and said, "I just don't know."

The End


	6. The Killing Joke

"Nathan, you're early!" Audrey complained playfully, throwing open her door. Her eyes widened in surprise, because it wasn't Nathan who stood there.

Just before the wire of a stun-gun hit her in the chest, Audrey had time to realize that...

VI.

...the last time she saw her assailant he'd been wearing a tux and had been surrounded by a silver frame.

When Audrey groggily opened her eyes an unknown amount of time later a very young, very concerned face was staring down at her. He made no move to stop her when she used her hands to force herself up into a sitting position. As soon as she did, she realized that she was in the back of a van.

It wasn't moving.

"What?" she asked before her circuits overloaded and she couldn't think of how to formulate a coherent sentence.

"Thank God you're okay," the boy said, looking relieved. "I screwed up so bad."

"You think?" Audrey asked, giving him a hard stare. They'd only met once, when she'd seen his father picking him up and stopped to ask him a question.

"My dad is going to kill me," he moaned. "If the chief doesn't first."

He must have meant Nathan, she decided, since some people still called him that despite the murky truth of the matter. She tried to think of the boy's name. "Ken-"

"Ben," he quickly corrected.

"Ben, they probably are going to kill you." A small pissed off part of her was happy to see that his face go pale. "Why the hell did you shoot me with a stun gun?"

"I didn't know it was that kind of stun gun!" the kid wailed. "I thought you had to touch someone with it...It surprised the hell out of me when I accidentally made it go off."

"So, what, did you find it in your dad's car?"

"Yeah," Ben replied miserably.

"And..." Audrey prompted. "You were going to show it to me or something?"

"No. It's my dad's birthday."

"Oh." The hazy image of Stan's birthday showing up on the station's Outlook calendar surfaced, but she wasn't sure when the date was. If his son said it was his birthday, it probably was. "Did you tase me as a gift to him? Nathan's complained that I've been edgy lately, but I don't remember doing anything that bad to your father."

"No no, it's part of the theme of his birthday."

"I know that some law enforcement folks are purposely tased so they know what it feels like and don't use a taser lightly, but I can't think of any party uses for a taser."

Ben shifted, sitting down next to her rather than crouching. "It was kind going to be a practical joke. I was going to 'kidnap' the guests and bring them to the house for the party - Mom wanted it to be before anyone went to work since he totally wouldn't expect a morning party. Dad said you like parties, but he didn't understand the Christmas in July one."

"That one was fun. No one ended up locked in a trunk," Audrey mumbled.

"What?" Ben asked, confused. She merely waved her hand at him. "But then the taser worked for real...my mom is going to be so pissed at me. I've been here waiting for you to wake up, rather than help her with the party stuff."

"So I'm the victim of a practical joke gone wrong?"

"Basically. I am soooo sorry."

"Yeah, okay."

Ben pushed the rear door open, and Audrey swayed when she tried to get out. Ben grabbed her elbow. "Uh...I think you need some help."

"Probably."

With Ben's assistance, she got up the stairs, and stopped dead in the middle of the doorway to her apartment. "What the hell happened?"

"I forgot that part," Ben admitted. "I tried to find something to wake you up before I decided that I'd better bring you out to my van to see if you needed to go to the hospital. It seemed like it'd be better than leaving you here if you stopped breathing or something."

"Wonderful. My life potentially in the hands of a seventeen-year-old who couldn't decide if being tased required medical treatment."

"We didn't cover that in first aid," Ben said defensively.

Worried, Audrey looked over at the stove. "At least you turned the burner off."

"I didn't."

"Then who did?" Audrey asked slowly.

Stan's son shrugged. "The chief was here. He must have."

"Nathan was here, and you didn't say anything to him?" she asked, incredulous.

"He looked angry enough to kill someone!" Ben protested. "No way was I going to draw attention to myself."

"Coward," Audrey complained, pulling out her phone. Ben gave her yet another apologetic look, but didn't correct her.

When the phone didn't do anything but go directly to voicemail, she began to worry. Where had he gone off looking mad enough to kill? More importantly, who had he gone after? Her first guess had her frantically dialing again.

The End


	7. Through a Glass Darkly

"Nathan, you're early!" Audrey complained playfully, throwing open her door. Her eyes widened in surprise, because it wasn't Nathan who stood there.

Just before the wire of a stun-gun hit her in the chest, Audrey had time to realize that...

VII.

...the man with the stun gun was the second to last man in Haven she'd ever expected to hurt her. She tried to ask him why but her voice didn't work, and soon her sight didn't either.

Some time later a hand shook her roughly and she reluctantly opened her eyes. As she turned to look at him it was on the tip of her tongue to ask Duke if seeing his father's ghost had literally made him lose his mind, but the words dried up when she really looked at him. The man behind the wheel of the unfamiliar vehicle was unfamiliar too.

"You're not Duke," she eventually croaked. For some reason the fact that she was wearing a seat belt was almost as startling as realizing that there had been at least one case of mistaken identity between them.

It was still daylight so she could see him well enough to get a good look at him. He was a few years older than Duke, forty perhaps, and beginning to gray at the temples. Faint lines that Duke's face lacked still reinforced the suggestion of greater age, and she could tell that he was also slightly heavier and less fit than Duke. But the resemblance to her friend was very strong, strong enough to explain why in her confusion upon opening the door she'd mistaken him for Duke.

Audrey made no attempt to be discrete, and the man endured her scrutiny with a sardonic smirk that was harder than Duke had ever managed. "Chase," he said, breaking his silence at last. The resemblance between the two men didn't extend to their voices.

At first she was baffled as to what he meant, but it eventually sunk in that he'd just given his name. "Duke and Chase? Simon must have really wanted a dog, huh?"

She expected him to be as insulted as Duke would have been if she ever dared speak the thought, but Chase just gave a short jerky nod. "Harley has said that about Pop since we were kids."

Harley, she wondered before thinking back to what Nathan had told her Duke said about Simon the day that Haven became Egypt. Simon might have liked to travel, but he must have liked his women to have a certain look considering how much his sons looked alike despite only being half-brothers. "Will I be meeting the third member of the Crocker Brother Trio?" Somehow she hoped not.

"Nah. Harley and Pop never got along any better than Pop and Duke did, even though Duke was still just a runt the last time he saw Pop. I'm the only one who really gave a damn about anything our father had to say to any of us."

A sinking feeling filled her. Simon's shade in Haven one day, and one of his wayward sons there the next couldn't be a coincidence. "You're the oldest?" she asked, and he gave another jerky nod. "I've heard that the oldest often is the closest to their parents, or hates them the most. Not that I'd know either way from experience myself-"

She'd been about to say something about that being due to having grown up in the foster care system, but Chase interrupted before she could. "Of course you don't. You're not even real."

Audrey gave him an indigent look despite having had that very thought herself in several low moments over the past few months. "So that means that kidnapping me is a-ok?" she asked, deciding that arguing about whether or not she was a real person was pointless.

Chase shrugged. "Why wouldn't it be?"

"Do I really need to try and recite Shylock's monologue in Merchants of Venice from memory? Come on, give me a break here. I don't even like that play." When he just gave her a blank look she sighed and decided that Duke was the smart brother. "'If you prick us, do we not bleed' and so on."

While Duke probably would have smirked at "prick us" Chase just gave her a stony glare. "Make no mistake, I am not my kid brother. You're not going to charm me into deciding that you're harmless. I know that you're evil."

"How did you reach that conclusion considering we didn't exchange a word before you shocked me?" Although she was doing her best to put up a brave front, she was terrified that she might know how he'd come by his negative opinion of her.

His next words confirmed her worst suspicions. "I got a call the night before last, way after midnight, from one of Pop's old buddies, Jerry Trudo," Chase told her, naming of the Rev's more prominent followers. "He said that the Rev was in Haven again, Pop too, but they couldn't leave so if I wanted to talk to them I'd better get here on the double.

"I thought that he was drunk or crazy, and said so, but he insisted that Pop was there with him. He added that Pop couldn't hold a phone, but put him on speaker phone, and I'll be damned if the guy didn't sound just like him. 'Pop' made me promise to come to Haven and I said I would, but I made the promise intending to come only to kick his and Jerry's butts both for playing such a bizarre prank on me. Then I got here..."

"And you saw him? Your father's ghost. You know he's dead."

"Yeah, I saw his ghost. And he explained that it was your fault that he was dead."

The words "you killed my father, prepare to die," irreverently floated through her mind, but Chase didn't pull a gun on her, which she cautiously hoped was a positive sign even though the only qualities he seemed to share with his half-brother were the negative ones. "That'd be a neat trick, killing a man I've never even met until yesterday." Though she wasn't even sure if the day before counted considering she couldn't see Simon herself.

Chase shook his head. "Don't give me that. I know that you've come to Haven a bunch of times, turning up like a bad penny over and over again."

"A bad penny that helped a bunch of troubled people instead of killing them like your sainted father," she retorted.

He grimaced. "I'm probably the last-" he shook his head, "all right, third to last, person who would call Simon Crocker a saint. But that still didn't mean that you had the right to kill him like you did."

"I've never killed anyone except in self-defense," Audrey protested, trying not to think of her role in Matt's explosive self-destruction. "Even if I am coming back again and again in some sort of regeneration thing, you get that I have no memory of what anyone else I might have been before did, don't you? If you were a Buddhist like your brother you'd probably understand."

Chase snorted. "As if I'd want to be anything like him. The only reason I didn't leave Haven the second that Pop faded out is because of Duke's shortcomings."

"What?" Audrey asked, not liking his disgusted tone.

"Pop told me that the kid doesn't have it in him to do what needs doing around here. The way he acted, a least from what Jerry's girl said-" She realized that Jerry's 'girl' must have been one of the people arrested the day before, but she didn't know if Chase was referring to a daughter or girlfriend. "-he's too soft. Useless."

It didn't seem wise to protest that his brother had been a lot of help to her and Nathan, because she knew without asking that helpful to the police didn't equal useful in the man's book. "What needs doing?" she asked quietly instead. "Killing me, you mean?"

He glanced at her. "He told you what Pop's note said. Somehow I'm not surprised. What needs doing is freeing the troubled from their afflictions-"

Audrey interrupted. "- and by 'freeing' you mean murdering them."

"If you know about Pop's note, you probably know only the oldest member of a family has to die to break the family's curse."

"Great. A bunch of dead senior citizens. Republicans will laud Haven's healthcare cost savings initiative during the election cycle next year." She leaned back into her seat. "I take it you have the same trouble as Duke."

"That's right." He looked away momentarily. "But I can't do it all myself. That's why we're here, you and I."

It took her a moment to realize that he was being literal. "I'm not troubled."

"No," he agreed. "But you are trouble. And leverage."

"Leverage?" Audrey's heart pounded so fiercely that it was a surprise that he didn't seem to hear it too.

"Killing you now would end the troubles - for a while. And if the troubles ended now, all the families we haven't freed yet would just suffer again when the troubles came back, which we both know they would. So I have a better idea. Duke is foolish enough to care about you, so I'll use his ill-considered affections to make him do what I want. Of course I won't explain why killing you now isn't the best idea. No, I'll let him think that doing what Pop wanted will be the only thing to keep you safe."

Audrey swallowed hard. "And I'm just supposed to keep my mouth shut about the truth?"

Chase turned down an unfamiliar dirt road. "Who do you think you'll see to tell?"

The End

* * *

><p><em>an: Since it matters to some readers, I am a republican myself. If you can't poke fun at your own party..._


	8. Fetched

"Nathan, you're early!" Audrey complained playfully, throwing open her door. Her eyes widened in surprise, because it wasn't Nathan who stood there.

Just before the wire of a stun-gun hit her in the chest, Audrey had time to realize that...

VIII.

... She never should have trusted the man. And as her head hit her own welcome mat, she couldn't remember why she had in the first place.

When she finally came to, it was because there was a crossbow digging into her lower back and one of her thighs. Fortunately this was because she was lying on it, not because anyone was threatening her with it. At the moment. "Oww," she complained wiggling until it wasn't so painful.

"You're awake," a familiar voice commented.

"Astute observation. Nice van. Got any candy?" This is exactly the sort of vehicle that would've given the other Audrey's teachers fits back when they were kids, she decided, and there hadn't even been a taser involved in the adults' stories designed to make them afraid of strange men.

The eyes that observed her through the rearview mirror didn't look amused. "Funny," he said flatly.

"Not really. Mind telling me what the hell is going on, Dwight?" she asked, tone bitter. "If you're going to kill me, you could've had the decency of letting me die at home."

Although her words had been chosen to needle him, she wasn't entirely convinced that she was meant to survive the encounter. She barely knew the man who claimed to have been the guy that the chief called in to clean up messes, so she couldn't put anything past him. Who knew what he was capable of?

"I mind."

"Sure you do. First you're the chief's lap dog, at his beck and call, so you claim. Now he's gone. Who's pulling your strings these days? I know you didn't just decide to kidnap me on a whim."

The man behind the wheel winced, so maybe she'd hit a nerve. He really didn't seem to have a personal reason for frying her nerves and running off with her, so the theory that he had done it at the behest of someone else made the most sense.

"He's worried about you," Dwight said at last.

_He_? she wondered. "You know Hallmark sells cards for that. No need to zap anyone with a billion volts of electricity to prove you care."

"It wasn't a billion."

"You think I care how many volts it was? It was enough to hurt like hell."

"Sorry."

"You're sorry? How about you prove that by letting me go, huh?"

Audrey hadn't really expected him to agree to it, but her shoulders still slumped when he said, "I can't do that."

"Of course not. Eventually being arrested for kidnapping a police officer is so much more reasonable a course of action," she muttered.

But as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she began to wonder that would really be the outcome. Dwight was used to making things look like accidents...

"Will you at least tell me where were going?"

He didn't bother to say no.

After what felt like ages to Audrey, Dwight finally pulled into a gravel driveway; not that she could see it so much as feel how the tires slipped over the uneven surface. She tried to wiggle up right enough to look out the windshield, but hadn't managed to by the time Dwight swung the van's rear doors open.

She looked down at the rope that held her ankles together before saying "please don't pick me up again."

Dwight made a dismissive noise before pulling out a pocket knife. Her eyes widened in fear until he reached down and severed the rope between her feet. "I trust you won't try to run off," he said, knife still in his hand. It felt like a threat.

"And miss meeting my host? Wouldn't dream of it."

Dwight sighed and prodded her around the front of the van. It was only then that she realized they were standing in front of a cabin with only pine trees for neighbors. For no reason she was reminded of how odd she found Northerners' fondness for the summer "camps" that many owned; hanging out somewhere with no electricity and an excess of mosquitoes and ticks was no way to spend a vacation as far she was concerned.

Dwight got tired of her gawking and nudged her to get her going. For a moment she was tempted to stubbornly stand her ground just to see how he'd react, but she didn't think the mental picture of her being thrown over his shoulder like a sack of grain that this evoked would be far off the mark, so she reluctantly went where directed.

Inside the hard glassy stare of fake eyes met her own. The still in dead animals were posed to make them look fierce, as if they weren't the to be pitied for their brutal deaths and further desiccated corpses.

Looking back, she asked, "where is he?" Sure now who had demanded her presence.

"Right here, dear," a familiar voice said from the archway that crudely separated the large boxy room into living and kitchen areas. Dave's face was absent its customary good-natured smile. Instead his expression reminded her of the only other time she'd seen him look so dour - there had been a hunt then too.

"I should've known," she muttered, but she hadn't. If she hadn't liked him so much, maybe his behavior the morning before would've offered her a clue. "Why?" she asked more forcefully.

Dave shook his head, looking mournful, but she didn't believe this was sincere for second. "You changing, just like Sarah did," he explained. "I can't let what happened when you were her happen again. I was too close to Sarah. I haven't made that mistake again."

_As if_, she found herself thinking with distaste. The wedding ring and the photo suggested how close he'd been to Sarah. He was more than old enough to be her father, so that would have never happen again. "What happened to Sarah?" she eventually asked. To her frustration, Dave just shook his head. "Uh, Dave? Does that old chestnut about people who are ignorant of the past being doomed to repeat it sound at all familiar?" Stubbornly continue to shake his head, his lips pressed into a grim line.

"A lot of people died," Dwight offered, but a sharp look from Dave shut him up before he could say more.

"If I promise not to kill a lot of people, can I go home?"

Dave looked like he was disappointed in her. When he opened his mouth, he revealed that he was. "It's not like I hadn't hoped to avoid all of this. I let Vince sell me on the idea that maybe you'd remain stable if you fell in love sooner, so I went along with him encouraging Nathan's interest in you, even though doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity. It's taken a little longer for this personality to slip into hypervigilance than Sarah did, but clearly the Crocker who declared that love conquers all was a fool. Maybe if we pushed you towards Duke instead... Well, that's moot now, isn't it?"

Audrey had to swallow down her indignation least she give him more evidence towards his instability theory. Still, the idea that Nathan's feelings for her, or vice versa, had anything to do with being manipulated was absurd. Wasn't it? "So what's the plan, Dave? Kill me and hope you can mold the next version of me more to your liking?"

To her surprise, he shook his head. "If I wanted you dead, you would have been hours ago. I haven't given up on you yet, Audrey."

This should have made her hopeful but it didn't. "So how long do you plan to keep me here?" That had to be the plan, she decided. There was no other reason for dragging her out to God only knew where.

"Until you can be made to see reason. Really, it's up to you."

She stared at him, as afraid again as she had been when Dwight went cut the rope. What did he mean by reasonable?

The End


	9. Sacrifice

"Nathan, you're early!" Audrey complained playfully, throwing open her door. Her eyes widened in surprise, because it wasn't Nathan who stood there.

Just before the wire of a stun-gun hit her in the chest, Audrey had time to realize that...

IX.

...she hadn't thought about the other woman in months.

It was dark when she came to, and at first she thought it must be night. This worried her at first because nothing she'd ever read about tasers suggested that they could steal half a day from you, but eventually she worked out that she was in a dark place, and not outside. This had been difficult to discern at first because she felt the roughness of tree bark beneath her bound hands, and her nose told her that there was something earthy in the air, competing with a fainter trace of the sea. When her eyes finally adjusted to the dim light she came to realize that she was in a crude, windowless, log cabin.

And her attacker was standing several yards away, staring impassively at her. Audrey instinctively scooted back, until her back hit a rough hewed wall that was damp to the touch. This seemed to amuse the other woman, but she made no move to come at her with a taser again.

When Audrey caught the woman's eye, she just had one word to say to her. "Why?"

"I heard about yesterday," she said, as if that was an explanation.

"A lot happened yesterday. You'll have to be more specific," Audrey replied, thinking furiously. Why this cabin? Was this where she went now that the lighthouse was gone? Why hadn't she wondered that before? As long as no one died, she'd been content to let herself believe that the other woman was reformed, so to speak.

"That haunted boy...his saved baby," the woman said, sounding detached.

With a start Audrey found herself thinking about the woman's own babies. Had Benny spoken his first words yet? Or Jean? Or the other little girl whose name she hadn't bothered to ask? Looking up at the harbor master, Audrey spoke slowly, hoping to draw the other woman's attention back from wherever it had gone. "This is about the boy who ran into Duke's knife?" she asked. Not that she thought of the troubled man who had died with Duke's unwitting help as a boy - he'd been her age, maybe a year older.

Beattie nodded. "His child is free. It will never know the pain of hurting others unintentionally. He made a beautiful sacrifice."

It was as Beattie said the last word did things begin to slide into a horrible place. All of the sudden she thought she knew what the other woman's plan was. But she needed to ask to be sure. "What does any of that have to do with me?"

Staring at her, Beattie cocked her head, seemingly puzzled by Audrey's question. "You seemed like the best way to make them angry."

"Who?" Audrey asked, mouth dry. She was pretty sure that she knew who Beattie meant.

"Duke and Nathan," Beattie explained, and it didn't come as a surprise. There weren't that many people in Haven who would both be angry if Audrey went missing and capable of doing something in retaliation. "Well, Nathan's anger isn't that important though it'll help him conclude that we're here given the cabin is deeded in my name, but I'm sure that he and Duke would both be furious if something happened to you. And I want Duke furious with me."

This chilled Audrey, and she looked up at Beattie with eyes wide. "Something like me being kidnapped?"

Beattie smiled. "At least."

"You wouldn't-"

The other woman shook her head in a slow, sad way. "I know about you, Audrey Parker. People in this town, they talk. Poor orphaned girl, never growing up with a parent's love. That's terribly sad, you know. Of course you don't know how far a good mother would go to make sure her children have a better life than she does. You didn't grow up with someone who loved you more than themselves like you ought to have. I can't make excuses for your parents, whoever they might have been, but I love _my_ children."

Desperately casting about for an idea that would keep the woman from hurting her, or herself, Audrey tried to turn Beattie's words around. "You're right. How I grew up was pretty sad. I wished with all my heart that my mother would come back for me," Audrey told her, hoping that one of the things the harbormaster knew about her wasn't that her only childhood memories had belonged to another person. "So I can't believe that you're willing to put your children through that too. I mean, that's what we're talking about, isn't it, Beattie? You getting Duke so pissed off that he kills you."

Beattie gave her a long look but didn't deny the accusation.

Audrey went on, hoping to appeal to her better nature. "If you die, they'll have the same sort of childhood I did, one without their mother's love."

The other woman narrowed her eyes. "Jean has found a good home already, where she's loved. Benny and Alice are still small enough to be lovable to other families as well. They won't remember me. They won't need to know that if I'd lived they'd grow up to be the sort of monster I turned into when the troubles came back."

"But-" Audrey protested, but she was silenced with a sharp look.

"No. What the girls are likely to become is bad enough. But what if my son inherits my trouble? How many women could he end up killing with his children? He wouldn't even need to go through an accelerated pregnancy before breeding again. I can't be responsible for more deaths, Audrey."

"The troubles could go away," she said weakly. Or maybe Jean would have her father's trouble, not her mother's she thought, but didn't dare suggest. She knew if she brought that up Beattie would retort that she'd then be placed in the position of maybe needing to kill her own sister and brother to stop them some day.

"For a while," Beattie corrected her. "They come back, you know they do."

The problem was that Audrey did know that they came back. Rather than try to think of something else to convince Beattie that her death wasn't the right way to solve anything, Audrey began to explore the rope looped around her wrists, counting on the dimness inside the cabin keeping her actions from being obvious.

"No more clever arguments?" Beattie asked sardonically. "And here I thought I'd have to bring Duke up."

Audrey's head shot up. "What about him?"

"If he ends my trouble, he could have a relationship with our daughter," Beattie explained. "You didn't think of that, did you?"

In response she just made a noncommittal noise. Whatever angst Duke suffered over knowing that he couldn't be around his child was something he kept to himself. There was some, she was sure, but like her and Nathan he'd been too consumed by what was going on in Haven over the past few months to soliloquize more remote worries. When she realized that Beattie was staring at her, she said, "I hadn't."

"Maybe he'll go and get her back," Beattie mused, making Audrey even more sure that the woman had lost her mind. The adoption had been completely above board, and he'd signed the papers in her presence, so how did Beattie think he'd contest the arrangement? "To honor my dying request."

"If you hurt me, I don't think he'll be in a wish granting mood," Audrey muttered.

She didn't realize that she'd spoken loud enough to be heard until Beattie said grimly "We'll see."

The End


	10. Mirror, Mirror

"Nathan, you're early!" Audrey complained playfully, throwing open her door. Her eyes widened in surprise, because it wasn't Nathan who stood there.

Just before the wire of a stun-gun hit her in the chest, Audrey had time to realize that...

10.

…she was looking in a mirror. Just one made of flesh and blood. Struggling hard, Audrey tried to keep from losing consciousness. She tried to get her mouth to form the words to her question but her rioting muscles just couldn't calm down enough to attend to her orders.

Later on, after she'd been manhandled into a strange vehicle and driven somewhere unfamiliar, she found that she could finally speak to her tormentor. "Why?" Audrey demanded to know.

The other woman, her twin if twenty years older, gave her a long look. "You have to let it happen," she told her. Unsurprisingly, her voice was as familiar as her face.

"It?" Audrey raised a hand that still trembled and tried to brush the hair out of her face. Thinking about hair had her wondering what color dye Lucy used, because her hair color wasn't natural, not with their complexion.

Their. It was hard for Audrey not to let herself fall into as chasm of hysterical panic, because her house of cards had just crashed down around her. It had seemed to make sense that she was Lucy once, and come again. But this was Lucy next to her, so who was she?

Ignorant of Audrey's internal struggle, Lucy just shrugged. "There's a war brewing. It happened once before. Dave Teague kept it from playing out the way it should have then. I won't let him or anyone keep it from coming. Not this time."

"I won't let you," Audrey told her, horrified that the person who had taken her relished the idea of a war, and had embraced it. They might look alike, but they were so different. Even only knowing her an hour made that clear.

Lucy gave her a long look. "What makes you think I'll give you the opportunity to interfere again?"

It was only as Lucy spoke that Audrey realized that she was vaguely familiar with the area they'd driven into. It was the cliff where the man she'd come to Haven to find had lost his life.

Her eyes widened with fear when Lucy stopped the car and came around to the passenger side. Lucy yanked her out, and as soon as Audrey's feet hit the ground she knew that she was too weak to fight back. Helpless, she stumbled when Lucy yanked her toward the cliff's edge.

"Why?" Audrey demanded to know again, her voice more plaintive.

"It was meant to happen this way." Lucy stared at her, and for one moment Audrey expected her to claim that she was going to take her place, but time marked her, and no one would believe they were the same woman. Mother and child, maybe, but not twins. "But you weren't meant to happen at all. You're a mistake."

Small rocks began to cascade down the edge of the cliff, they were so close to the edge now. "A mistake?"

"You got the wrong memories," Lucy said, almost feeling sad. "Too many of law and order from what I've heard. We need to begin again."

"By killing me?" Audrey demanded to know, trying to force some strength back into her limbs through force of will.

"It'd be a good start," Lucy agreed. Her fingers pushed against Audrey, and she felt her balance giving way even as a familiar voice shouted at Lucy. Lucy looked over her shoulder, unperturbed by the interruption.

All Audrey could do was try to dig her feet into the uneven ground and hold on long enough for him to get there.

The End

* * *

><p><em>an: I think we'll end this here. Alas, I never got around to writing the version where she opens the door and finds someone from Division coming to cart her away. Sorry, fellow Nikita fans._


End file.
